SHIRIN NESHAT

In a highly fictionalised and stylised way, Neshat’s new video installation addresses the sexual exploitation of female politicalprisoners by the Islamic Republic’s regime in Iran. Subjected to severe torture, sexual assault, including rape, it is commonly knownthat even after being released, many of the women are unable to recover emotionally from the trauma experienced in prison, and often commit suicide. The video traces the psychological and emotional journey of a young Iranian woman, who, although now lives freely in the United States, remains traumatised by her memories in captivity. Shown alongside this video is a new photographic series that focuses more directly on the female body as both an object of desire and of violence. The nude portraits of a diverse selection of women convey a sense of beauty, dignity, confidence, and pride, yet pain, vulnerability, and trauma. Although both _The Fur_y video installation and photographic series were shot in the Spring of 2022, before the current “Woman, Life, Freedom”Revolution, these new series speak the truth about the reality of Iranian men and women political prisoners who are currently kept behind bars.

For decades, Neshat’s expansive body of work has focused on the problematics of the female body in Islamic cultures, specifically in relation to her country, Iran, and the way in which the female body has continued to be a contested space for sin, shame, desire,

repression, politics, while also rebellion, power and protest. In her earliest photographic series Unveiling (1992), Neshat questioned the role of the veil in Islam. By concealing a woman’s body, the veil is used as a tool to eradicate all sexual temptations from the public domain. These sensual and provocative images of Iranian women explored the subjects’ emotional and psychological state of living under constant surveillance, including mandatory veiling. The images embodied a sense of submission yet disobedience, a paradox that was again further enhanced by the inscribed poetry of Forough Farokhzad, the renowned female Iranian poet, known for the radical feminist nature of her literature.

Later, in her photographic series, Women of Allah (1994–1997), Neshat expanded her inquiry about the female body further as apolitical space in relation to the 1979 Islamic Revolution. During and in the aftermath of the Revolution, the veil became the core of the regime’s identity, and women’s bodies were a battleground for men’s political, ideological and religious rhetoric. Women ofAllah very specifically framed the concept of ‘martyrdom’ and captured images of women who became voluntarily militant in their conviction to the Islamic Revolution, and the religious fervour that flourished in Iran at the time. In these provocative and paradoxical images, the female gaze projected a sense of conviction, devotion, submission yet cruelty, and violence. The Fury builds upon this legacy of interrogating and spotlighting issues that impact women, both in Iran and globally.

Shirin Neshat is an Iranian-born artist and filmmaker living in New York. In 2022, Neshat was the subject of the most comprehensive installation of her photographs and video works, Land of Dreams at SITE Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 2019, Neshat was the subject of a retrospective exhibition, Shirin Neshat: I Will Greet the Sun Again at The Broad, Los Angeles, which will travel to The ModernArt Museum of Fort Worth on February 19 and remain on view through May 16, 2021. She has mounted numerous solo exhibitions at museums internationally, including: ARoS Aarhus Art Museum, Copenhagen; Musée de l’Eysée, Lausanne, Switzerland; NationalGallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; Kunstraum Dornbirn, Dornbirn, Austria; KunsthalleTübingen, Tübingen, Germany; Museo Correr, Venice, Italy; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; StedelijkMuseum, Amsterdam; the Serpentine Gallery, London; Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal.A major retrospective of her work was exhibited at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 2013. Neshat was awarded the Golden LionAward, the First International Prize at the 48th Biennale di Venezia (1999), the Hiroshima Freedom Prize (2005), the Dorothy andLillian Gish Prize (2006), and the Praemium Imperiale Prize (2017). In 2009, Neshat directed her first feature-length film, WomenWithout Men, which received the Silver Lion Award for “Best Director” at the 66th Venice International Film Festival.